Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Are the 330K pots ok for HB1s ? Should I change the tone pots to 500K or all four to 500K ?

I've tried both 330K and 500K all around and I do think 500K helps a bit in the case of HB-1 pickups. But I dislike what it does to the pot taper. Next time I might try 500K volume and 330K tone as I rarely find I care much how big or small the tone pot is, it's usually changing the volume that makes the biggest difference to my ear.

Yes, +1 to Dane's comment. In fact even better than a tone pot, some people have designs for wiring up varitone pots where you just switch from cap to cap, from no cap at all to 0.1 uF, etc. This can be much more wide-ranging in terms of sound and the cool thing about it is that the hinge frequency changes as well as the amount of highs lost.

Someone will have to verify this (or correct me) but I believe two said varitone switches in parallel (i.e. on a Ric) will have twice as much value (in Farads) than one by itself would. This means two 0.1 uF caps in parallel sum to 0.2 uF and lower the hinge frequency. But this could also be affected by what you have the switch selected to... one with 0.1 uF and one with 0.01 uF would sum to 0.11 uF. Again, I could be wrong but I think this is how it would work for a Ric with two said tone controls in the mono setup.

Great info. Thanks to all.

For the tone cap, I also take a middle ground: a Sprague orange drop .033. It lets a player control the upper mids a little bit better than either the guitar .022 cap or the bass .047 cap.